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⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
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Further reading ⇓

□ Overview
1998
□ 1 □ 2 □ 3 □ 4 □ 5 □ 6 □ 7 □ 8 □ 9 □ 10 □ 11 □ 12
1999
□ 13 □ 14 □ 15 □ 16 □ 17 □ 18 □ 19 □ 20 □ 21 □ 22 □ 23 □ 24
2000
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2001
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2002
□ 49 □ 50 □ 51 □ 52 □ 53 □ 54 □ 55 □ 56 □ 57 □ 58 □ 59 □ 60
2003
□ 61 □ 62 □ 63 □ 64 □ 65 □ 66 □ 67 □ 68 □ 69 □ 70 □ 71 □ 72
2004
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2005
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2006
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Issue 1: January 1998

Welcome

This is the first issue of a newsletter aimed at keeping people in the UK informed about the work of the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The aim is to issue the newsletter once a month and to distribute to those people who have indicated their interest.

W3C Office in the UK

The newsletter is being made available from the new UK Office of W3C at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Similar Offices will be opened in a set of European countries to provide a local point of contact with W3C. The funding for these Offices is coming from an ESPRIT Leveraging Action called W3C-LA whose aim is to raise awareness of W3C and its role in Europe. The long term result, hopefully, is that Europe will become more aware of W3C and participate more in its activities. Also, if the European membership of W3C increases, the influence of Europe in the future of the Web will also increase.

HTML 4.0

In December, HTML 4.0 was released as a W3C Recommendation. HTML 4.0 is the product of a cross-industry agreement on a wide range of features for richer and more accessible Web pages. Adobe, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Novell, Reuters, SoftQuad, Spyglass, Sun and others were all involved in the definition.

The main enhancements are:

HTML 4.0 includes many features that promise to open up the Web to people with disabilities, for instance, richer descriptions for images, labels for form fields, and the means to associate table data with headers for use with speech-based browsers or Braille readers.

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is developing detailed authoring guidelines for how to make your pages accessible to all. This will open up the Web to millions of users who hitherto have been held back by pages designed only for people using graphical browsers. See: http://www.w3.org/Press/HTML4-REC for the Press release and further details. Both Netscape and Microsoft will support HTML 4.0. Microsoft claims to support it now.

Ragget on HTML 4

A good book on HTML 4.0 is Raggett on HTML 4 (Addison-Wesley) by Dave Raggett et al. Dave joined W3C in May 1995 on secondment from HP Labs. He is editor of HTML 3.2 and one of the editors of HTML 4.0.

Dave Raggett

Dave Raggett

HTML Validator Service

To help people write correct HTML, a W3C HTML Validation Service at: http://validator.w3.org/ has been made available. This can be used to check conformance against HTML 4.0 and earlier versions of HTML such as HTML3.2. The aim is to add WAI guidelines to the validation service so that users can produce pages equally accessible to people with disabilities.

New Members

New members continue to join W3C and the number has now reached 229 with a regional break down of:

Full Affiliate
Americas 30 103
Europe 31 35
Asia-Oceania 14 16

The first generation of members of W3C were the companies dependent on the Web for their livelihood (both hardware and software). Then came the companies who had faith that the Web would be critical to their business. We are now seeing a trend towards content providers and large end-users joining the Consortium because of their own experience of the Web, its limitations and the features that they need. They want to influence the way the Web develops.

Since October some of the household names that have joined are Disney Online, Boeing, IEEE, Matsushita and Macromedia. The complete list is:

CommerceNet Boeing
DSTC, Australia Disney Online
goodcompany.com George Washington Univ
IEEE Hong Kong University
DCA, Australia MatchLogic
Internet Lawyers Conf EUNet Intl BV
MCC Matsushita
Coalition for Networked Information Trellix
Helsinki Telephone Corp Eprise
Macromedia Junglee
Perspecta Pacific Softworks
StuartMcIntosh Inc Sandpiper Networks
Bristol University (UK) Telecom Columbia

It is a pity that there is only one additional UK member!

London Symposium

The Symposium in London on 3 December, 1997 at the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) to launch the new W3C Leveraging Action (W3C-LA) for Europe was a great success with 180 IT and Company Directors attending. Jeff Abramatic, the Chairman of W3C, gave an Overview of W3C followed by Tim Berners-Lee giving his view of the future of the Web. Transcripts of both talks are available from the UK W3C Office.

In the afternoon, Philipp Hoschka, Bert Bos and Josef Dietl gave detailed talks on the Architecture, User Interface and Technology & Society Domains.

Similar Symposia are scheduled for Stockholm, Bonn and Amsterdam on 30 March, 1 and 2 April, 1998.

Jeff Abramatic speaking at the RSA

Jeff Abramatic speaking at the RSA
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© UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council

Road Shows

We have been quite active raising awareness of W3C by exhibiting at the following Conferences:

Future Exhibiting

WWW7

The annual World-Wide Web Conference this year is in Brisbane, Australia from 14-18 April, 1998. Tim Berners-Lee and James Gosling are two of the invited speakers. W3C will be running a track throughout the Conference describing many of the W3C activities and will make a major contribution to Developer's Day on the last day of the Conference.

Advertising WWW7 at the RSA Symposium, Martin Prime, Helen Ashman, Robert Cailliau, Brian Ritchie

Advertising WWW7 at the RSA Symposium, Martin Prime, Helen Ashman, Robert Cailliau, Brian Ritchie
Full image ⇗
© UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council
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